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IV.
Summary of the Factors of Modesty--The Future of Modesty--Modesty
an Essential Element of Love.
We have seen that the factors of modesty are numerous. To
attempt to explain modesty by dismissing it as merely an example
of psychic paralysis, of _Stauung_, is to elude the problem
by the statement of what is little more than a truism. Modesty
is a complexus of emotions with their concomitant ideas which
we must unravel to comprehend.
We have found among the factors of modesty: (1) the primitive
animal gesture of sexual refusal on the part of the female
when she is not at that moment of her generative life at which
she desires the male's advances; (2) the fear of arousing
disgust, a fear primarily due to the close proximity of the
sexual centre to the points of exit of those excretions which
are useless and unpleasant, even in many cases to animals;
(3) the fear of the magic influence of sexual phenomena, and
the ceremonial and ritual practices primarily based on this
fear, and ultimately passing into simple rules of decorum
which are signs and guardians of modesty; (4) the development
of ornament and clothing, concomitantly fostering alike the
modesty which represses male sexual desire and the coquetry
which seeks to allure it; (5) the conception of women as property,
imparting a new and powerful sanction to an emotion already
based on more natural and primitive facts.
It must always be remembered that these factors do not usually
occur separately. Very often they are all of them implied
in a single impulse of modesty. We unravel the cord in order
to investigate its construction, but in real life the strands
are more or less indistinguishably twisted together.
It may still be asked finally whether, on the whole, modesty
really becomes a more prominent emotion as civilization advances.
I do not think this position can be maintained. It is a great
mistake, as we have seen, to suppose that in becoming extended
modesty also becomes intensified. On the contrary, this very
extension is a sign of weakness. Among savages, modesty is
far more radical and invincible than among the civilized.
Of the Araucanian women of Chile, Treutler has remarked that
they are distinctly more modest than the Christian white population,
and such observations might be indefinitely extended. It is,
as we have already noted, in a new and crude civilization,
eager to mark its separation from a barbarism it has yet scarcely
escaped, that we find an extravagant and fantastic anxiety
to extend the limits of modesty in life, and art, and literature.
In older and more mature civilizations--in classical antiquity,
in old Japan, in France--modesty, while still a very real
influence, becomes a much less predominant and all-pervading
influence. In life it becomes subservient to human use, in
art to beauty, in literature to expression.
Among ourselves we may note that modesty is a much more invincible
motive among the lower social classes than among the more
cultivated classes. This is so even when we should expect
the influence of occupation to induce familiarity. Thus I
have been told of a ballet-girl who thinks it immodest to
bathe in the fashion customary at the seaside, and cannot
make up her mind to do so, but she appears on the stage every
night in tights as a matter of course; while Fanny Kemble,
in her _Reminiscences_, tells of an actress, accustomed to
appear in tights, who died a martyr to modesty rather than
allow a surgeon to see her inflamed knee. Modesty is, indeed,
a part of self-respect, but in the fully-developed human being
self-respect itself holds in check any excessive modesty.[72]
We must remember, moreover, that there are more definite grounds
for the subordination of modesty with the development of civilization.
We have seen that the factors of modesty are many, and that
most of them are based on emotions which make little urgent
appeal save to races in a savage or barbarous condition. Thus,
disgust, as Richet has truly pointed out, necessarily decreases
as knowledge increases.[73] As we analyze and understand our
experiences better, so they cause us less disgust. A rotten
egg is disgusting, but the chemist feels no disgust toward
sulphuretted hydrogen; while a solution of propylamin does
not produce the disgusting impression of that human physical
uncleanliness of which it is an odorous constituent. As disgust
becomes analyzed, and as self-respect tends to increased physical
purity, so the factor of disgust in modesty is minimized.
The factor of ceremonial uncleanness, again, which plays so
urgent a part in modesty at certain stages of culture, is
to-day without influence except in so far as it survives in
etiquette. In the same way the social-economic factor of modesty,
based on the conception of women as property, belongs to a
stage of human development which is wholly alien to an advanced
civilization. Even the most fundamental impulse of all, the
gesture of sexual refusal, is normally only imperative among
animals and savages. Thus civilization tends to subordinate,
if not to minimize, modesty, to render it a grace of life
rather than a fundamental social law of life. But an essential
grace of life it still remains, and whatever delicate variations
it may assume we can scarcely conceive of its disappearance.
In the art of love, however, it is more than a grace; it must
always be fundamental. Modesty is not indeed the last word
of love, but it is the necessary foundation for all love's
most exquisite audacities, the foundation which alone gives
worth and sweetness to what Senancour calls its "delicious
impudence."[74] Without modesty we could not have, nor
rightly value at its true worth, that bold and pure candor
which is at once the final revelation of love and the seal
of its sincerity.
Even Hohenemser--who argues that for the perfect man there
could be no shame, because shame rests on an inner conflict
in one's own personality, and "the perfect man knows
no inner conflict"--believes that, since humanity is
imperfect, modesty possesses a high and, indeed, symptomatic
value, for "its presence shows that according to the
measure of a man's ideal personality, his valuations are established."
Dugas goes further, and asserts that the ideals of modesty
develop with human development, and forever take on new and
finer forms. "There is," he declares, "a very
close relationship between naturalness, or sincerity, and
modesty, for in love, naturalness is the ideal attained, and
modesty is only the fear of coming short of that ideal. Naturalness
is the sign and the test of perfect love. It is the sign of
it, for, when love can show itself natural and true, one may
conclude that it is purified of its unavowable imperfections
or defects, of its alloy of wretched and petty passions, its
grossness, its chimerical notions, that it has become strong
and healthy and vigorous. It is the ordeal of it, for to show
itself natural, to be always true, without shrinking, it must
have all the lovable qualities, and have them without seeking,
as a second nature. What we call 'natural,' is indeed really
acquired; it is the gift of a physical and moral evolution
which it is precisely the object of modesty to keep. Modesty
is the feeling of the true, that is to say, of the healthy,
in love; it long exists as a vision, not yet attained; vague,
yet sufficiently clear for all that deviates from it to be
repelled as offensive and painful. At first, a remote and
seemingly inaccessible ideal, as it comes nearer it grows
human and individual, and emerges from the region of dream,
ceasing not to be loved as ideal, even when it is possessed
as real.
"At first sight, it seems paradoxical to define modesty
as an aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary,
to be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the
problem, we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal
functions, disengaged from its superstitions, its variegated
customs and prejudices, the true modesty of simple and healthy
natures, as far removed from prudery as from immodesty. And
what we term the natural, or the true in love, is the singular
mingling of two forms of imaginations, wrongly supposed to
be incompatible: ideal aspiration and the sense for the realities
of life. Thus defined, modesty not only repudiates that cold
and dissolving criticism which deprives love of all poetry,
and prepares the way for a brutal realism; it also excludes
that light and detached imagination which floats above love,
the mere idealism of heroic sentiments, which cherishes poetic
illusions, and passes, without seeing it, the love that is
real and alive. True modesty implies a love not addressed
to the heroes of vain romances, but to living people, with
their feet on the earth. But on the other hand, modesty is
the respect of love; if it is not shocked by its physical
necessities, if it accepts physiological and psychological
conditions, it also maintains the ideal of those moral proprieties
outside of which, for all of us, love cannot be enjoyed. When
love is really felt, and not vainly imagined, modesty is the
requirement of an ideal of dignity, conceived as the very
condition of that love. Separate modesty from love, that is,
from love which is not floating in the air, but crystallized
around a real person, and its psychological reality, its poignant
and tragic character, disappears." (Dugas, "La Pudeur,"
_Revue Philosophique_, Nov., 1903.) So conceived, modesty
becomes a virtue, almost identical with the Roman _modestia_.
FOOTNOTES:
[72] Freud remarks that one may often hear, concerning elderly
ladies, that in their youth in the country, they suffered,
almost to collapse, from haemorrhages from the genital passage,
because they were too modest to seek medical advice and examination;
he adds that it is extremely rare to find such an attitude
among our young women to-day. (S. Freud, _Zur Neurosenlehre_,
1906, p. 182.) It would be easy to find evidence of the disappearance
of misplaced signs of modesty formerly prevalent, although
this mark of increasing civilization has not always penetrated
to our laws and regulations.
[73] "Disgust," he remarks, "is a sort of synthesis
which attaches to the total form of objects, and which must
diminish and disappear as scientific analysis separates into
parts what, as a whole, is so repugnant."
[74] Senancour, _De l'Amour_, 1834, vol. i, p. 316. He remarks
that a useless and false reserve is due to stupidity rather
than to modesty. |
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